I have moved my itunes library to c:datashared music on my current pc and that worked so I was assuming I could move it to a server directory and it would still work.

You can do that, but the down side is that the iTunes Music Library.xml doesn’t move over with it. Which means that you don’t get iTunes playlists or ratings, or that kind of thing.

There is another way to do that using one of the xp powertools to move your whole “my music” folder to point at the server. If your iTunes were in My Music/iTunes, then you could move your whole iTunes stuff up that way.

Another way would be to use a file synchronization tool like Unison to sync your iTunes library from your PC to the slug.

– have Firefly run on SLUG with 2 USB drives, for mirror of first drive
– have 2 libraries on USB drive 1, one for my WMP library, second for my kids iTunes library
– have the iTunes clients point to the files on the SLUG server, so that if playlists added/songs purchased, everything done on the SLUG USB drive 1.
– have the WMP clients point to the files on the SLUG server, so that if playlists added/songs purchased, everything done on the SLUG USB drive 1.
– have a backup run nightly that backsup the SLUG USB drive 1 to drive 2

That sounds reasonable.

– will this approach work? anyone else already doing this and have suggestions?

Yes. With the warning that playlists created in iTunes won’t show up, although there are some things that can be done with that (manually syncing the iTunes database so firefly can pick playlists out of it, or using the tweakui trick)

– I assume the Itunes clients and WMP clients just access the server via file system, No usage of firefly for them. Is that correct?

iTunes can access it via firefly. You won’t be able to edit tags or create playlists with songs like that (that are shared through the firefly server), but you absolutely can access them straight from the file system.

It might be nice though to have it sharing as an iTunes share so guests can access the music, or someone can still access music without mapping a drive etc on a shared machine.

– I assume that Soundbridge accesses the USB drives via Firefly server running on SLUG/Debian. That they can access the podcasts originally provided by iTunes. Is that correct?

Correct.

– other suggestions to backup approach, like how to prevent deletes, since I am ONLY adding files for music files.

That’s one reason I like the manual sync solution. I keep my master database on one machine, and sync that to the slug for sharing. That way even if something happens to the files on the slug, I still have my master db.

– any suggestions for USB drives, anything to watch out for, I have heard that some USB drives do not shutdown so they are more prone to early failure

There is a thread on that somewhere in the general that’s toward the top about best usb drive enclosures. Here, I think: